Know what buyers want. Before they do.

For the past 30+ years, I have sold technology products and solutions, contributing millions of dollars in revenue and profits for large enterprise software companies, hardware manufacturers, ecommerce suppliers, solution integrators and consultants and a few early SaaS startups. I’ve held positions in sales, channels, consulting and marketing and executive roles as GM, VP, EVP and CEO/founder.

Throughout my career, I’ve been helping technology buyers navigate products and solution offerings to make more informed and quality purchase decisions. From this experience, I learned to focus on how buyers made decisions, what triggered their desire to change, who influenced their evaluations and what purchase criteria they relied on to make their final decision.

Who better to tell you what a prospective buyer is thinking than someone who just spent time and money to solve the same problems that you address.

Understanding the self-educated buyer

Absent any direct interaction with the self-educated buyer, we step-in to interview recent buyers about their post decision triggers, goals and final decision criteria and use the insights to anticipate what prospective buyers will do.

We aggregate the information from across recent wins, losses, and no decision deals, isolate the patterns and interpret the results. There really is no natural way in the normal course of business to find out what the self-educated buyer is thinking, what they believe and what’s on their mind. And it’s their beliefs we need to adjust!

Turning insights into opportunity

Our clients are generating 3 times as many quality marketing leads and many have seen their lead to sales conversion increase by as much as 57% year over year.

In new markets, several clients have experienced more than 15% growth in sales directly attributed to the improvement in quality leads. Many of these same clients have reduced their marketing spend or kept increases to within 1% of budget.

In addition, with 4 to 5 times more social shares, engagement and links, it’s safe to say that their content is connecting with self-educated buyers.

The self-educated buyer is not connecting with marketing personas

Already this year in 2018, I’ve personally had lengthy interviews with over 400 buyers that recently evaluated our client’s products and solutions. It wasn’t pleasant to report back that they were losing deals, at least in part, because buyers couldn’t get the information or appropriate answers from their sales and marketing interactions, that would give them the confidence to invest.

Many of these buyers indicated that our clients websites and marketing materials portrayed the same obvious benefits as their competition and did nothing to help them make a buying decision. And their experience with sales people was mostly a continuation of this theme, as sales would pitch with the same benefits based marketing message rather than share the details and capabilities they needed to ensure the projects success.

As a career sales and marketing professional, I’m shocked and amazed that every company hasn’t realized that the fictitious personas and the fake scripts that rely on them, are the problem. And that fixing them is the easiest way to gain a competitive advantage.